Loaded with rapists.

Dan has always been resentful of the way the Blackhawks have been pushed on the sports market since McDonough came to the team. I have fuzzy memories of them announcing the hire back in October or November of 2007, then saying something like "people want to take calls on this. We're not taking calls on this" and moving on to Bears talk, who, to be fair, had gone to the Super Bowl the year before.

But as soon as the Blackhawks made the playoffs the next year, Dan started getting squirmy about the beat writers not being tough enough or the media being too openly pro-Hawks on the local news or corporate-sector bandwagoning in general, which is all McDonough stuff, of course. When they won the first championship the next season after that, Dan started talking about how it was time to take the training wheels off and start covering the Blackhawks like a "real" team. This always struck me as odd, considering the Score's coverage of the Bears was "real" in the sense that breast implants are real (factually speaking, they exist in this world, but that's clearly not what we mean here, ma'am), Dan was still in the throes of White Sox dick-sucking in 2010, and had also said that the Bulls signing LeBron James would be a bigger deal than the Blackhawks winning the Stanley Cup, so if the Hawks were going to start being covered like a real team, it sure as shit wasn't going to start with anyone at this station. The only real Hawks talk we got from the Score for the next three years was about why fighting is bad.

Kane's misadventures in Madison got Dan pretty excited because in 2012, Rose was still a benign manchild who hadn't yet betrayed the Really Smart People, so this was an opportunity to crow about how, in fact, the spoiled cute white kid was the dangerous scoundrel while the tattooed black guy from Englewood was actually the polite gentleman. I think he even said he'd rather have Derrick Rose show up on his doorstep to date his daughter than Patrick Kane, and in September 2015, the less said about this, folks, the better, so let's move on.

2013, the Blackhawks come out of the lockout, destroy everything in their path. Somewhere in there, Hossa is feted for 1,000 games or 1,000 points (I forget, maybe both), and Dan grumbles the next day that McDonough sure can lay on the schmaltz for an Irishman. DAT'S EXACLY RITE, FRITZY! DA MICKS ARE JUS LIKE DA JOOS! DEY BOAT MAKE GOOD LAWYERS CUZ DEY TALK SO GOOD! Hawks win the Cup a second time in four years, Dan gets annoyed that people are happy about this, says we need to sit in quiet contemplation about what this means. Translation: OH MY GOD SHUT UP I DON'T CARE LEAVE ME ALONE. Drinky adds during the parade that girls there deserve to get knocked up and not know who the father is. I wonder what else he feels girls who like hockey deserve as this story unfolds.

That brings us more or less to the present, where Dan tried to expose the adultery and cuckoldry going on in the dressing room, stepped in shit by cutting too close on a Cheryl Scott joke, but then had the rape story fall into his lap. Jackpot!

Bottom line, Dan talks about McDonough the way a boy with an Oedipus complex talks about his dad. "Hate my father? I love my father! I respect him so much. He's so great. There's nothing I could possibly dislike about my father! That he loves my mother doesn't bother me at all! I encourage it!" For how much he talks about respecting the job McDonough has done, I don't think he's very glad that McDonough did the job in the first place. How could he when he abhors the feel-good marketing blitzes and complicit media that compose it? Dan fancies himself a journalist when he's not telling people the Bulls will do nothing wrong, or rooting for Theo and the mayor to use their secret Jewish Wondertwin powers to build billboards at Wrigley Field, so the support the Blackhawks have gotten from the media has always rubbed him the wrong way.

Don't get me wrong: the Patrick Kane story is hugely important because arguably the best player in franchise history has almost certainly ended his career in Chicago, if not his career altogether, because he's a terrible drunk and almost certainly raped someone. The happy era of the Blackhawks is now over; the empire is officially in sleazy decline. I mean, this shit makes a Fleetwood Mac episode of Behind The Music look tidy. Having something built so well come crashing down like this certainly deserves dedicated coverage, but I don't doubt for a minute that this is personal for Dan. All the years of standing athwart the McDonough marketing machine and "talk more hockey" callers has built up to this for him. The Hawks being elite has been nothing but a nuisance, if not an offense of his personal sensibilities, for him, and now he's going to relish and take part in the dismantling of the machine. You want to talk more hockey? Here's your hockey. You've been worshiping a false idol all along. With this, we can all stop pretending we like the Blackhawks and get back to what sports talk radio is supposed to be about in February: asking Terry Boers to guess the ten most statistically similar players to Corliss Williamson.

I'm a big dumb shitlib baby

or rooting for Theo and the mayor to use their secret Jewish Wondertwin powers to build billboards at Wrigley Field

You were doing ok until the last paragraph. If Kane isnt charged, why would the Hawks dump him? Even without Kane the Hawks are still one of the elite teams and organizations in the NHL, and their pipeline is loaded. The future is bright for the Hawks.

The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.

Kane has already done irreparable damage to himself and to the organization.

You don't simply replace Patrick Kane through the farm system. Christ, he's a first overall! The pipeline is loaded with second/third wings and defensemen. That's awesome, but it doesn't replace a superstar.

This sounds like an avatar you need to make.

Really? What players in the Hawks minor leagues are rapists?

Yes it is.

When this is all over, which is not going to be for a while, Trump will be re-elected President.